From: glevy@PRATT.EDU
Date: Fri Dec 28 2007 - 13:00:44 EST
> I doubt if open source software is totally "free". There
are costs
> associated with its installation, modification and
maintenance. People
> often talk about "free goods"
(products) but usually there are costs, and
> the question is
whose costs they are, and who pays for them.
Hi Jurriaan:
Echoes of Milton Friedman ("there's no such
thing as a free lunch")?
What is consisidered in mainstream
theory to be "free" is tied to a
particular
conception of scarcity.
If someone is not _paid_ to
install, modify, and maintain the software
(and if there are no
additional capital costs), why wouldn't it be considered
to be
free? Are you implicitly valuing the leisure time of users
and
volunteer work (?) of developers?
===================
Addressing another issue (to all
who have written in this thread):
Couldn't (wouldn't?) new
breakthroughs in *proprietary* software
systems potentially
render Open Source obsolete?
And, on a related theme, couldn't
hardware manfacturers (who have
formed associations with software
developers) configure systems
so that they couldn't run Open
Source?
In solidarity, Jerry
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